Personal blog of Gene Chapman, CEO, Mahatma Gandhi Global Library and Book Exchange and Libertarian Global Library and Book Exchange.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Taxation V. Slavery for Benevolence

In Gandhian Philosophy, we draw upon all religions, all economics systems and all philosophies to guide our decisions. While I now worship God as Truth Only, I come from the Innerrant Christian tradition, so I draw most commonly from this angle to inform my thinking.

There is a story in the Old Testament of a man who was an interpreter of dreams. He was asked by the leader of the nation to interpret a dream about seven fat cows verses seven lean cows. It was determined that the fat cows were representative of years of plenty in the land, while the lean cows represented seven years of famine in the land.

They determined that God's will would be to impose a 20% tax on increase from asset throughout the land to fill the store houses for preparation to get the population through the leans years. And it worked. The interpreter's family showed up to purchase grain years into the lean years, so the level of benevolence is questionable, as the grain was not freely given. But the larger issue is that a tax of a very particular moral sort was utilized ultimately for human and animal preservation (benevolent) purposes and blessed by God.

There are some who wrongly believe that we are to be taxed upon our labor and/ or the intrinsic value of our property. They point to the tithe they pay to their church as an example. Sadly, for them, the Bible presents no example of such an arrangement. This taxation idea they pull from their church was made up in their church, not from Christian scripture. And nothing of a tithe (a religious covenant) was ever translated to state control as a tax, as the Marxist would have us believe. Tithe and tax are two different words with different meanings.

When we tax labor (the wage tax), we are operating as "enslavers" (andrapodistes in the Greek). When we tax the intrinsic value of property or property in land, we also are enslavers. And when we number people as cattle for those purposes, we also touch upon the definition of an enslaver.

Enslavers: (Greek word: andrapodistes): 1) those who impose a taxing of labor upon uncondemned free persons; thus, under the judgement of the Moral Law of God. 2) to number as cattle (see: 1 Timothy 1:10).

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